


From under the tree

by princessofmind



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Very brief mentions of death and failed suicide attempts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 06:16:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2955320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessofmind/pseuds/princessofmind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You like to consider yourself a fairly intelligent individual, and one not prone to falling under the spell of peer pressure, but being a teenager tends to kind of disable your brain at the worst moments.  Which was how you ended up in the graveyard with a bunch of kids from your history class and a ouija board, a sinking feeling in your stomach growing with every step you took.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From under the tree

When you met her, you thought you were dead.

You like to consider yourself a fairly intelligent individual, and one not prone to falling under the spell of peer pressure, but being a teenager tends to kind of disable your brain at the worst moments. Which was how you ended up in the graveyard with a bunch of kids from your history class and a ouija board, a sinking feeling in your stomach growing with every step you took.

They hadn’t stuck around for long. It was unseasonably cold, cold enough that your fingers were numb before you’d even settled between the tombstones, and the fog was thick enough that you could barely see the person at the front of the group. But no one wanted to be the first person to turn tail and run, so an uneasy circle is formed on the damp grass and the bottles of liquor are set next to the cheap cardboard in the middle.

And of course, the batteries in every one of their flashlights die, and the wind howls, and all hell breaks loose. Teenagers scatter like flies, and you’re no exception, rushing through the dark with a single-minded purpose to just make it out of here without getting cursed or eaten or arrested or any other number of things your frantic mind can create.

That’s when you see her, under the lone, gnarled tree that never seems to have any leaves no matter what the season but still hasn’t been cut down. Her dress is loose and flows like water, a pale blue that reminds you of the sky first thing in the morning. You’d think her a specter, too ethereal with her pale skin and gauzy dress, but there’s freckles on her nose and her red hair is wild, barely contained in a bun on top of her head with loose curls falling into her face.

She’s beautiful.

And she notices you, of course, standing there staring like an idiot, staring at her as your heart beats a thousand miles an hour in residual panic.

“It’s really stupid to be messing around with this stuff on Halloween,” she says, and instead of having a melodious voice, echoing like soft sound in a cavern, she just sounds disgruntled. “I don’t think anything here would actually hurt you, but still.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” you say, a bit defensively. “I told them it was stupid, but they called me superstitious and a baby.”

“Well, you’re also an idiot for going with them,” the girl says, rolling her eyes. “And now you’re lost, I’d bet.”

There’s only one graveyard, on the sprawling hills just outside town, stretching on and out in a seemingly endless maze of stone and statue. On a clear day, you can see the buildings and lights stretching out below, but tonight, he can barely see the person he’s talking to.

“I’m not lost,” you say, defensively. “Just…turned around, that’s all.”

The girl laughs and walks over to you, and she smells like dried flowers and damp earth, her eyes a deep, endless blue that isn’t the slightest bit natural. “Well, allow me to un-turn you. It’ll make me look bad if you get lost and freeze to death out here.”

“Well, I’m so glad that you’re helping me out of the goodness of your heart,” you reply, maybe a bit sourly, and she just laughs and takes your hand to lead you back into the fog, away from the tree. Her hands are cold as ice, and part of you was expecting her to not be able to touch you. “What do you mean, make you look bad?”

“Just what it sounds like,” she replies. “I’ve got a reputation to uphold, after all.”

“Are you a ghost?”

Frowning in exasperation, the girl turns around and flicks you none too gently between the eyes. “I couldn’t touch you if I was a ghost, stupid.”

Well, that doesn’t really tell you anything, because even if she’s not a ghost, humans don’t have eyes like that and walk around in the graveyard at night in what basically equates to a nightgown. You’re wearing your thickest coat and a scarf and you’re still shivering as the two of you plod endlessly on. It feels like there’s something watching you, following right at your heels and preparing to nip at the hem of your coat any second. But every time you look back, there’s nothing there, but you swear you can hear something breathing.

It feels like you walk forever, stumbling over rocks and twisting around stones much further than you remember coming in, but sure enough, she delivers you safely to the big stone entryway lit with electric lights that shine like a beacon home. You heave a sigh of relief, and she laughs.

“I told you that I’d get you back,” she says, giving your hand a little squeeze before letting go. “Now get home, before you freeze.”

As if on autopilot, you wake forward, but stop before you can cross the threshold onto the sidewalk. She’s watching you, her hands loose by her side and her expression unreadable. “What’s your name?”

Her smile is equal parts sad and wistful. “Beatrice.”

That night, you dream of ice cold fingertips on your face, the smell of dead roses, and eyes on your back that make you shudder.

 

 

 

When you return to the graveyard the next week, there’s no sign of anyone being there. The fallen leaves, blown in from the forrest, are undisturbed, and the tree has no one standing next to it. You feel foolish, like maybe you hallucinated the whole thing, but your dreams are haunted and you feel restless and unsure, like there’s something tugging on your insides.

It’s not until nearly Thanksgiving that the fog returns, not nearly as thick as on that fateful night, but present enough to make the evening carry that same feeling of ethereal peace, a pressure in the air that hinted at rain to come. You slip out anyways, heart in your throat as you tip-toe down the stairs and pull your coat on before slipping out into the night. It feels strangely illicit.

You wander aimlessly into the hills, something telling you that it doesn’t matter where you go, so long as you keep walking. And eventually, you find the tree, and she’s sitting there against the trunk, knees drawn up to her chest and her gaze turned towards the sky as if imagining the stars that are obscured by the thick wisps of white.

She’s startled, when you draw nearer, a suspicious look in her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

And truly, that’s probably the worst question she could have asked, because you don’t know how to put the magnetic pull and the dreams into words without sounding crazed, or pathetic, so you answer in the form of your eyes on the ground and your shoe kicking aimlessly against a stray rock.

“What’s _your_ name?”

Part of you doesn’t want her to know, for some reason. She’s beautiful like fresh, untrodden snow, mysterious and bitter and painfully lonely, and you’re a teenager with acne scars and limbs too long for the rest of your body and a voice that hasn’t changed and too much contrasting pessimism and frantic hope to make sense in one person.

“Wirt.”

“That’s a dumb name.”

But she still invites you to sit under the tree with you, and when you look up at the sky, you can see something purple and blue and pink swirling there, barely noticeable but almost like the aurora borealis, stealing your breath from your lungs and captivating you until your lips are blue and Beatrice loops her arm in yours to walk you back to the stone arch.

That night, you dream of clouds swirling around you, inside your clothes and in your hair and mouth, and her voice tinkling like bells in your ears.

 

 

 

You learn to crave the nights where the sky is blocked by wisps and it’s oppressively cold outside, because those are the nights you slip out to the graveyard and lay under the tree, pointing out imagined constellations or watching the wind move in entrancing patterns. Sometimes you talk, tell her about school and your family and how you feel like you outgrew the people you love, that you aren’t troubled enough or successful enough to garner their attention, and you’re a character in the background as they raise your stepbrother.

She listens attentively, although she rarely says much about herself. You remember the night she told you that she knows what that feels like, to be forgotten by your family and to spend your time acting like more of a mother to her ten younger siblings than the woman who birthed them. She reassures you that she holds no ill will towards them, but that she wishes that she had mattered more, felt more important and wanted and needed than just as someone who had nothing better to do than take care of the children.

You ask what happened to them, and she doesn’t answer except to scoot closer until she’s pressed up against your side, and when you put your arm around her, she lets out the softest little sigh that makes your heart burst inside your chest.

Things start to take a course of it’s own. As the snow begins to fall, the foggy nights happen more often, and you bring blankets and books and pictures and mugs of hot chocolate to her, and even if she never seems cold even with ice on her lashes and in her hair, she never turns down the hot drink or the soft embrace of fleece. You huddle under there with her, to let her leech off your body heat even just for a moment, and when the color bleeds into her white cheeks, you can’t believe that she looks even more beautiful when she’s human.

On Christmas, you sneak out with hot cider and a clumsily wrapped box that holds a necklace inside, polished silver with a circular pendant that’s adorned with curling vines and flowers and tiny birds, intricate almost to the point of nonsense, but that’s something that makes you think of her. When she opens it, she immediately removes it with shaking fingers, and the silver rests perfectly in the hollow of her throat, and when she cries, it looks like tiny diamonds streaking her cheeks.

You kiss her, and she clutches at you like you’re the most perfect thing on earth.

 

 

 

There’s no snow at her tree, when you arrive. There’s white powder all over, sticking to your messy hair and boots, but an almost perfect circle of green surrounds the tree, which has blossoms and leaves reaching up towards the clear night sky. She’s warm and perfect, her skin still pale but undeniably colored, like an early summer peach that flushes in pleasure when you arrive.

And you don’t know what she sees. You’re clumsy and verbose, sulky and moody and according to the girls in school, no more attractive than a telephone pole. But you adore her, and maybe that’s enough to make up for your faults, because she seems to enjoy the way you bicker, the way you brush her hair out of her face and smile and read bad poetry that you write just for her. She kisses the words from your lips, and her hands are shy against the back of your neck, but she curls against you under the tree and fits so perfectly in your arms that it feels like pieces of you are left behind every morning that you leave before the first crack of dawn.

So you start looking, first at your computer and then at the library, pouring over genealogy reports with nothing more than a first name and a short, bitter story about too many children and parents who were too busy to do their jobs.

You find Beatrice Carter, a girl with ten siblings and a father and mother who ran a farm on sprawling acres outside a town that was only just beginning to form.

She went missing when she was seventeen, disappeared seemingly without a trace, and the only thing the police had to go on was a noose left hanging from a tree at the edge of their property.

A gnarled, twisted thing that never bloomed or grew leaves again.

The report says that her body was never found.

You touch her neck, as if looking for burns or cuts or the imprint of a rope, and kiss the unbroken skin while she looks up at the leaves that have browned but have not fallen, her eyes unspeakably sad, but no words leave her lips, and she doesn’t push you away.

 

 

 

 

 

The snow starts to thaw, and the weather is warm enough that you only have to wear a jacket when you go out. Your parents have stopped asking where you go, and you don’t think they’ve noticed that you don’t come back, that you spend your nights sleeping in the graveyard with the ghost of a girl who you don’t think you can live without now. The foggy nights are few and far between, and when you dream you dream of her, of her teasing laugh and the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles at you, of her hands on your chest and her arms around your waist, and the way it feels when she breathes and it tickles your hair.

And the tree that had bloomed in the winter is dead again, and she always looks so alone and scared when you arrive, fingers knotted together anxiously in her lap as she looks at the ground and the first tentative growths of grass that poke up through the thawing ground.

“Come with me,” you say, her cold fingers in your hands and her eyes firmly on your knees.

“I don’t know if I can leave,” she says, chewing her lip. “I don’t…I don’t know how long I’ve been here, or how I ended up here, or who I really am. I only know my name, and a little bit about my family.”

You always feel small and insignificant, like a gust of wind could knock you over and toss you away, but tugging her close and feeling the way she relaxes and melts against you makes you feel like a stone fortress, a thousand feet tall.

“I know that you’re Beatrice. And Beatrice likes annoying me, and tickling me even though I hate it, and reading the same book over and over again and drinking all the hot chocolate and kissing in the snow and having her hair braided. She loves her family, even if they aren’t here, and she’s the most perfect girl I’ve ever met in my whole life, despite anything else.”

Her face is flushed with color, her dress tattered and stained with mud, and her tears are water, plain water, as they roll down her cheeks. You’ve read this fairytale once, you think, so you cup her cheeks and kiss her the way she deserves to be kissed, softly with adoration and everything within you that yearns for her, body and soul.

There’s something warm there that you’ve never felt before, and you’ll never know what it was that kept her here, if it was her attempt at death or the loneliness you’ve felt strangling you from the inside out as you sit silently at the table and studiously ignore the way your stepbrother tries to include you in the conversation. It’s something dark and bitter that could just as easily trapped you here as her.

She’s clumsy instead of ethereal as you walk way from the tree, her feet bare and her cheeks hollow in a way that you’d not seen before. But she holds her hand as you lead her from the tombstones and the fog, and although she hesitates at the stone archway and the strange electric lights, she looks at your face and must find what she’s looking for, because she crosses the threshold and follows you home.


End file.
